The tree aims to identify how each member of the 40 man roster came to be with the Tigers, be it through free agency, the draft, Rule 5, or trades. In the case of trades, it traces back to find out how the players involved in the trade were acquired. In some instances this was pretty easy, like when the Tigers traded for Carlos Guillen they gave up 2 players (Juan Gonzalez and Ramon Santiago) who were signed as free agents out of Latin America. In other cases, like when the Tigers acquired Nate Robertson it can be traced back to Brad Ausmus and CJ Nitkowski.
A couple things are noticeable when looking at the tree. The Tigers 2002 and 2003 drafts are bearing fruit. Nine members of the 40 man roster were either members of those classes, or can be traced back to players that were acquired via players drafted in those years. Dave Dombrowski’s first draft was in 2002. Draw your own conclusions here.

But Randy Smith does still have fingerprints on this team and the roster. Omar Infante, Fernando Rodney, Humberto Sanchez, Brandon Inge, Ramon Santiago were all Smith signings. Also, Smith did draft Jeff Weaver in 1998 who of course brought in Jeremy Bonderman. Still, the lack of talent on the roster that was drafted in the late 90′s, while not surprising, is very evident.

To compile this I used The Baseball Cube and Baseball Reference extensively. In the coming weeks (and in all honesty it will probably be during the offseason) I’ll work to include links to player pages as well.

5 Comments

Good job Billfer. I got the same e-mail from Geoff about the San Diego tree. I was too lazy to do it myself but I was hoping somebody would do this for the Tigers. It seemed like the sort of thing that was right up your alley but I wasn’t sure how much time you had.

Kevin

August 14, 2006 at 10:17 pm

A couple thoughts…

No player on the team today is connected to the ’84 team. Not even Juan Berenguer or Ruppert Jones produced some token relief pitcher today. The farthest we can go back is to the 1990 season with Rich Rowland.

Also, those amazing 11-man trades that were made at least twice a year during the Randy Smith administration with the Astros and Padres which always seem to involve Brad Ausmus and CJ Nitkowski only appears to have played part in obtaining one player on the roster.

Another interesting study would be to see how a team, such as the 1984 Tigers were constructed, then deconstructed.

ryan

December 15, 2008 at 4:19 pm

these computers are so efin slow

Smoking Loon

December 15, 2008 at 4:57 pm

No kidding they’re slow. Took more than 2 years for your post to show up.